Politicians: The devil wears khadi

Bollywood doesn't like the evil that lurks in the hearts of politicians. Raajneeti's powerful anti-hero shows why.

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Kaveree Bamzai

June 4, 2010

ISSUE DATE: June 14, 2010

UPDATED: June 11, 2010 16:36 IST

We generate the power and then hand over the button to them. Why? It's one of the typically rousing statements in Raajneeti from Ajay Devgn, the Dalit kabaddi champion turned thorn-in-the-establishment flesh.

Ranbir Kapoor in Rajneeti

We are the powerless and they are the ones who want to keep us that way. It's a struggle as old as the hills, or at least as old as Raisina Hill, and in Prakash Jha's riveting film, it finds its ugliest depiction. No one is spared.

Not the industrialist's fresh-faced daughter (Katrina Kaif) who is in love with one brother but married to the other as a business merger. Not the Dalit politician (Devgn) who believes "they survive because of us". And certainly not the outsider (Ranbir Kapoor), just back from Boston where he is a week away from submitting his thesis on subtextual violence in 19th century Victorian poetry.

This is the politics that Jha's film explores, the unredeeming kind that brings out the shaitan (devil) in men. It brought out the shaitan in the Congress party as well, but it could have spared itself the bad press-there is little here that resembles the Gandhis, except for the widow who sweeps the election after the husband dies in a car bomb explosion. Bollywood has always been repelled by politicians, unless they look like the babalog who try to look like Rahul Gandhi-witness Abhishek Bachchan's Cambridge-educated, condom-supporting do-gooder in Paa.

When confronted by portly bellies and pudgy heads bearing Nehru topis, they prefer to stuff cliches down their throats about samaj and seva. Young people are seen as the new hope, who will march into the Vidhan Sabha as in Yuva or take the high road of justice in Sarkar Raj. Very rarely are they, especially if technologically savvy, armed with constituency profiles and satellite jammers, seen as the manipulators.

Kapoor's observant student, part Arjuna and part Michael Corleone, is just that, doomed to his destiny, selling his brother to the highest bidder to finance the campaign, killing an old faithful to pin the blame on another, and murdering a rival to clear the path of power for his family-no, Rahul Gandhi he is not, nor is he Sanjay Gandhi. Kapoor's Samar doesn't want power for himself. But he does want it all the same, and not because he is moved by the plight of the poor or the hunger of the starving.

It's a sophisticated and complex anti-hero, who is distracted by nothing, not Kaif's Donald Duck lips which whisper sweet nothings into his ear, not his American girlfriend's niggling doubts. There is little difference between him, the ruthless head of a family business or even a Mumbai ganglord. Of course, that is why he's given a cigarette to smoke in his quieter moments, a chess game on his BlackBerry he is addicted to, as well as reading glasses that give him the air of a mobster in mufti.

Indeed, Milan Luthria hints at this transformation of the smuggler into a problem-solving politician-in-waiting in the forthcoming Once Upon a Time in Mumbai, set in the 1970s. "Towards the end of the Emergency, the seeds were sown of this marriage of the mob and politics, when ordinary people, failed by the government, the police and the judiciary, would approach a Haji Mastan or a Karim Lala to resolve property disputes or family issues. This was the era when the Devdas instead of turning the other cheek would slap right back," says Luthria.

ajay Devgn with Kangana Ranaut in Once upon a time in Mumbai

Indeed, India 2010 is vastly different from that early disenchantment with politics. Now the disgust is deep-rooted, down to the village where the schemes named after prime ministers, past and present, converge, providing handpumps where there is no water, jobs where there is no work and homes where there is no money for bribes to get the oh-so-vital BPL certificates.

It's the kind of village Natha (Onkar Das) inhabits in Anusha Rizvi's forthcoming Peepli Live, where he will be forced to fake his own suicide so his family can get compensation. And politicians can go on air silkily proclaiming that their aam aadmi schemes are uncommon successes.

It's the same philosophy that guided the supposedly simple driver in Shyam Benegal's Well Done Abba to file an FIR against a well that was craftily constructed only on paper, one of the many ways a Centrally sponsored scheme ends up sponsoring nothing but corruption.

Onkar Das in Peepli Live

It takes a revolutionary to point out the obvious to the twisted politician in Raajneeti, when Naseeruddin Shah's Bhaskar Sanyal says angrily to the chief minister: "Go. We liberate you from your responsibility of removing poverty." Or when Devgn's Sooraj Kumar says: "We are our own owners. We run their kitchens, they don't run ours."

In Jha's merciless world of winner-takes-nothing, no one inherits the future. Not the wannabe woman MLA who will sleep her way to a ticket, not the girl in the Lexus convertible who gets her dream of driving in a car with a lal batti but only after becoming a widow (Kaif's Hindi accent is worse than Sonia Gandhi's), and certainly not the chief minister's son who wanted a civilised life as a teaching assistant in America. It's a bleak world, agrees Raajneeti writer Anjum Rajabali. "But then so is politics today."

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